Essential Doc Reads is a weekly feature in which the IDA staff recommends recent pieces about the documentary form and its processes. Here we feature think pieces and important news items from around the Internet, and articles from the Documentary magazine archive. We hope you enjoy!
At Filmmaker, Anthony Kaufman reports on the current state of digital distribution.
Is online distribution a boon to independent filmmakers or a boatload of false promises? Given that streaming/downloading is the primary way that many audiences are now consuming content, this may be the most pressing and important question for today's business-savvy independent filmmakers. But it's difficult to discern the answer.
At New York Magazine, Dayna Evans introduces the female artists who are making VR the most diverse corner of the tech world.
There are women in VR panels, conferences, support groups, and mentor relationships. Four of the 11 virtual-reality projects in the New York Film Festival's Convergence division, which focuses on VR and immersive storytelling, were created by women, and Convergence programmer Matt Bolish says in the five years of the program, "women have not only been at the forefront as creators, but as producers, writers, and financiers." And at the New Frontier VR exhibition at Sundance this past January - the program’s tenth anniversary - a record 13 of the 32 lead artists on VR projects were women. "This is really a powerful medium and we have to make sure we do better this time," says Kamal Sinclair, who directs the New Frontier Labs program. "We saw how women dropped out of computer science in the early '80s. They were there in the beginning. How do we make sure we learn from those missteps?"
At Indiewire, Anne Thompson highlights four new docs that address the agenda of Black Lives Matter.
There are four new documentaries that, while timed for Oscar votes, have a much bigger target audience: The American voters. These urgently topical films peel away decades of mythology, propaganda, and misinformation to reveal why so many people in this country are not only incarcerated in our thriving prison economy, but function inside prisons of misguided perception.
At Cinema Scope, Phil Coldiron considers a new trio of essay films by John Akomfrah.
Having offered early elaborations of a number of approaches which have become commonplace in the most sophisticated nonfiction filmmaking, Akomfrah has now conceived a new form for the material he has elected: a musical portraiture of mute figures based in the rhythmic and harmonic movement amongst, between, and within multiple screens of often breathtaking images which move in and out of phase with the films' equally dense soundtracks. The beauty that once emanated from the clarity of Akomfrah's insights into the dynamics of history has, over the course of the last decade, steadily been modulated into the stuff of the film itself, affording new vistas onto the problem of how and why images stick with us - a concern which must occupy a critical position in any sufficient conception of an ethical image culture.
At Psychology Today, filmmaker Michel Negroponte shares a filmmaking process that might be labelled the "movie cure."
"I think we live in a country that needs a hell of a lot more tolerance because most people severely underestimate the hardship of living with mental illness, poverty or addiction. It can be a very tough and lonely place. The power of film is that it can take you into worlds that you may never see or experience otherwise. If a film is effective, it's fundamentally a dissociative experience: you get inside the subject's head and get a visceral feeling for what makes them tick; you are being given the opportunity to identify with a complete stranger. If that interaction promotes empathy, that's more than enough for me."
"With its multiple meanings, qualifications, connotations and consequences, the VOD world for the independent filmmaker is a minefield, to paraphrase filmmaker-turned-digital distribution guru Jon Reiss. And until (if ever) there is predictability in monetization or, at the very least, a standardization of the VOD market, we'll have to take what we can at face value."
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